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Friday, 23 November 2012

If you are using Microsoft TMG 2010 and you come across an
issue where you have generated reports but the “Top Websites” shows blank with
just a “-“ and a total number of sites hit, there is a good chance the
following will resolve your issue.

1.Open TMG Management Console.

2.Click on “Logs & Reports”

3.Click on “Configure Web Proxy Logging”

4.Click on the “Fields” tab.

5.Ensure that “URL” and “URL Destination Host
Name” are both selected.

6.Apply this.

7.You will now need to wait 1 day before you can
test this. As you cant run generated reports on the current day’s
activity.

Monday, 5 November 2012

Here is a short video I took of the last few minutes of the firework's display at Fenton Park in Fenton, Stoke-on-Trent on 5th November 2012. The event as ever is hosted by the Stoke on Trent Lions Club.

Saturday, 3 November 2012

Legendary house DJ Graeme Park talks to 6 Towns Radio about Movember
2012. Graeme will be growing a tash to raise money and awareness for
mens health issues. He talks to 6 Towns's Radio's Terry Bossons about this and they of
course they talk DJing in this exclusive chat on November 1st 2012.

Tuesday, 30 October 2012

So, bit of a strange one i came across today on gmail/googlemail. I copy a e-mail address from a website and it kept saying "Please make sure that all addresses are properly formed" well they were, at first I thought it was because of the address it was like this someone@sales.example.com after much wasted time and looking on Google, it was some odd thing about because I copy it from a site and then paste it into the "To" box, I then typed it in manually and the mail sent, very strange, some encoded character issue or something.

Friday, 26 October 2012

25th October marked the eighth anniversary of the death of the legendary DJ and
radio presenter, John Peel. He was renowned for championing new and exciting bands and introducing them to
a wider audience.

This Saturday, 27th October, between 5-7pm, the Independent & Unsigned Show
on 6 Towns Radio will be dedicated to his memory, playing session tracks by many of the bands he introduced to listeners over the
years, including Joy Division, The Smiths, Skids, The Fall, Siouxsie & The Banshes and of course, The Undertones.

Join us on 6 Towns as we remember the most influential DJ in British
broadcasting history.

Thursday, 18 October 2012

On the 31st of October 2012 6 Towns Radio presenter Philip Anderson, who is himself blind, will be taking part in a 3 mile walk in aid of Guide Dogs For The Blind.

The walk – which has been organised by the association’s Shrewsbury office – takes place at Trentham Gardens at 2pm.

As it’s Halloween, participants have the option of donning their spookiest costume.

All funds raised will be used to further the invaluable work provided by Guide Dogs for the sole use of blind and partially sighted service users.

To make it easier Philip has set up a page for your donations on the Just Giving Website and hereby enclose the link https://www.justgiving.com/Philip-Anderson2 I know times are tough, so any help you are able to offer would be greatly appreciated.

Saturday, 6 October 2012

So, this was never going to be a easy job now was it ! I got a old Parrot bluetooth kit that I wanted to install into the Skoda, now having done this a few times before on different cars i kind of had a clue that this was going to take a little longer than normal. Job Requirements To BuyISO to Skoda Cable Mini blade fuse bypass holderMini blade fusesFirst of all you need to buy the converter cable, make sure that it will work with Parrot kits, as you can see on the right is the big Skoda connectors and on the left is the Parrot ones, and the red loose cable also, we will come to that later.

Now once you have this cable you can start the job, no you dont need to buy keys to remove the radio ! just a set of Torx screwdrivers. Best to unclip the pannel that goes around the radio, its just clips, to do this i used a small screwdriver and a computer blank plate. Then in each corner of the radio you will see a plastic plate that covers the screw holes so with a small screwdriver flick them out, you will now see the Trox screws, so un screw the four screws and your almost ready to remove the radio. If you pull it forward it should now come out on its own, well so far anyway, pull out slow as the connector is in the back plus the aerial cable. Once you have slid it out disconnect the aerial cable at rear (right) you can then disconnect the main connector rear (left) this is a bit tricky to do and you might need a small screwdriver to flick the clip on the bottom of the connector to get it out. Once you removed the connector you can remove the radio. Don't worry it wont loose the stations or ask for a code. Mine didn't and it was disconnected for a good few hours.

So now you have the radio out you will notice a issue, well you might not straight away but trust me you will see what i mean.You cant fit the bluetooth unit behind the radio it just wont fit at all. So I fitted mine to the side of the ashtracy just behind the gearbox, as you can see the blue unit in the image below. I put a cable tie around it to hold it in place so it does not move around. To do this you need to open the ashtracy unscrew the two torx screws at the front slide it out, disconnect the light (remember to reconnect later when you put it back) you can now unclip the gearbox cover also, just a few clips comes off dead easy. You now have easy access. I have left this on a connector block for a reason, later on I want to change the cigarette lighter to ignition live as its a permanent live, so behind the ashtray is easy access to do this job another day.

Now back to the problem, as you can see in the image below the inside left and right is plastic with cut outs, the cut outs are not big enough to fit the cables threw and you cant push the radio fully back with the extra cables. What I did was to get a hacksaw blade and cut some of them out as you can see below on the left where the cables come up from, lucky for me there was nothing at the back of this so it was time consuming and I did a neat job as best I could and now all the cables will feed up there and tuck nice down the side as the radio is slid back into place once its all done.

﻿

So another issue is the fact that the radio on newer Skoda's does not have a true ignition live, I wont go into how it works but its kind of cleaver and computer controlled live on the radio feed. Now you need a ignition live for the bluetooth otherwise it will stay on ! and you don't want that do you ? The only way to do it is to get a feed direct from the fuse box, oh no you cry not another pain, well its easy really when you know how. If you look on eBay for "piggy back mini blade fuse" you should find the item shown below (right) it allows you to plug a fuse into it and plug in an spare fuse slot and away you go ! dead easy, you just need to buy some mini fuses, this I forgot when on eBay so had to go to the local car parts shop and pay double the price £2 for a pack rather than the 99p ones on eBay, oh well. So find an ignition live in fuse box, I think 7 and 10 are free and ignition live, as shown below (left) just plug in and connect a cable to it and run it back to the rear of the radio and connect the RED wire that is on the adaptor kit to this. Its not to hard to get the cable to the radio as you can tuck it under the carpet where it joins the dashboard, just watch out for the heater vents!. Oh and use the correct fuse, I put a 5amp in that's more than enough.

So, it should now power up correctly. You can now hang the radio in loose and give it a try. Double check that it only powers up when the engine ignition is on, if not double check your wires, you may need to swap on the Parrot, i think its red and orange off top of my head but don't quote me look it up. Its the two with fuse holders. All done I thought, went to slide the radio back in and spotted this (image below) hang loose in there, I'm sure it wasn't there before, turns out its one of two sensors that are in the heating just above the radio, must have come loose, you need to look up and you can see a hold it goes in and pushes and twists to go in, don't know how it dropped out it was a pain to get back in !.

The last bit is to decide where to put the microphone, I went for the mirror and fed the cable inside the roof and down the pannel at side, it clips off quite easy, down to the floor, up to where to carpet joins the glove box and along, again watch out for the heaters, and behind the carpet into the bluetooth controller. The last bit is where to mount the outside unit with the dial and hang up and volume control, I went for centre dash as i could easy lift the frame up where the heaters were with out doing any damage and the cable can drop down behind the radio and get to the controller easy enough. See image below.﻿

Saturday, 22 September 2012

Reports have started to come in from all over the UK about Meteors been seen in the sky on 21st September 2012 about 11pm, this was apx 1 hour ago, one or two video's have started to appear and a few people have seen them so far.There is a few people in the local Stoke on Trent area who have seen this and posted there comments on the 6 Towns Radio Facebook page : -http://www.facebook.com/6Towns

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

I was using CDO in a VBS script to send a e-mail with a free disk space report on it, when I tried the script on any PC I had here it worked ok, yet when I tried it on site it didnt work I kept getting the following error.550 access denied - invalid HELOAt first I thought maybe port 25 was been blocked but it was not, so then I was think maybe the PC's are missing some strange Windows update that my PC's have, but they didnt. After much looking on Google all I could see was a reference to this error in Outlook and other mail clients, well I am using CDO in a VBS script so why should that matter you may ask, then the penny dropped, my PC's here all have Outlook on setup with mail accounts, the PC's on site I was trying this script on didnt have Outlook etc. Thats all I can think the issue was. The way around it is to add authentication to the VBS script as follows, as shown in red.Const cdoAnonymous = 0 'Do not authenticateConst cdoBasic = 1 'basic
(clear-text) authenticationSub SendMail(Sender, Recipient, Subject, Message)Set objMessage = CreateObject("CDO.Message")objMessage.Subject = SubjectobjMessage.From = SenderobjMessage.To = RecipientobjMessage.TextBody = MessageTested and then, it worked.

Friday, 14 September 2012

If your using Exchange Server 2010 and your trying to reset
someone’s voicemail PIN and you get the following error.

Now like me you may think strange and this normally works
with no problems, and miss the obvious bit in the first line of the error
(MapiExceptionShutoffQuotaExceeded) but it is just a simple issue that you cant
reset a PIN if there mailbox is full. If you get this error check the size of
the users mailbox and increase if required.

Unable to save Unified Messaging PIN for mailbox
'someone@example.com' : Cannot save changes made to an item to store.

Wednesday, 12 September 2012

Hot off the press here is the new iPhone 5 Specification as we know it now !

Screen Sizeis 4in (10.2cm)

Screen Ratio is now 16:9

The phone has built-in 4G capability, although
4G has not been introduced to the UK just yet the phone operators have plans to
launch a new 4G network to 20 million people in 16 cities in time for Christmas
2012.

Apple's new A6 chip is in the phone, giving
the phone a faster processing speed

A longer battery life. Apple is also claiming
users will be able to obtain 8 hours of 4G browsing.

There is no longer a 30 pin dock connector, there
is now a new "lightning" connector which will be much smaller and
which can be inserted in either direction.Adaptors will be available which mean old iPhone users will not have to
throw away their old cables and connectors.

It has FM
radio and bluetooth built in.

iOS 6 is the
onboard operating system, which adds another row of apps on each homescreen,
thanks to the longer screen, making for five app rows, plus the app dock on the
bottom.

There is a 8MP camera, backside illuminated sensor same
as the iPhone 4S, but now with a dynamic low-light mode for better night time
shooting to add to the 5-element lens and f/2.4 aperture. There's also a
panorama shooting mode natively built into the camera app for the first time,
with a 360-degree shot resulting in a giant 28 megapixel image.

Video capture
remains at 1080p, with improved video stabilisation and facial recognition
added. The front facing camera also jumps to 720p, which makes for sharper
FaceTime calls, which can now be made over mobile networks too, as well as
Wi-Fi networks.

Monday, 10 September 2012

Radio DNS, the technical collaboration between the BBC,
commercial radio and hundreds of broadcasters worldwide, has gone live on the
BBC national stations. The service, which has been under development within the
BBC for the last two years, allows “connected” radio sets to display meta (i.e.
now playing) data from the internet whilst picking up an FM signal. Radio DNS
joins the two signals together to offer listeners the best of both
worlds. In addition, RadioVIS is live on BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra showing enhanced
data such as images, live text and data.

Friday, 27 July 2012

Many businesses are concerned that they are spending too much money on their energy bills, according to a recent study. The findings, conducted by OnePoll have revealed that UK firms are worried about the financial impact energy bills are having on their overall expenditure. With the rise in energy prices, it's even more important that businesses are accounting for these costings by ensuring that measures are taken to reduce energy bills.

The survey questioned over 500 businesses across the UK and discovered that although 51% of business owners are worried about this, less than 20% had the management in place to monitor these energy costs. Many companies turned to their office manager, security or reception staff to monitor this, but experts are claiming that a financial team is needed to monitor and track all electricity usage to ensure that the maximum amount of energy is saved.

Julian Morgan, Managing Director of the Energy Advice Line, said, "With energy now a significant item of operational expenditure, firms needed to treat electricity and gas like any other essential business supply," as reported online at egovmonitor.com

In the same way that homeowners hunt around for the best price comparison on their gas and electricity, it is important for businesses to check the prices that competitors are offering as some companies may be able to offer a substantial discount.

Sunday, 22 July 2012

So yesterday I went to the Penkhull for the Jazz & Blues Festival 21st July 2012 with 6 Towns radio as we were presenting the bands and playing music in between the bands on stage. We were also broadcasting the whole thing live on the day from the middle of a church yard in Penkhull !. What a great day, the sun did come out and it was nice and hot, I arrived at about 11.30am and left at 9ish and it was still full then.

Went to see and record Hume 'n' Beans live at The Greyhound in Penkhull, they were as good as ever, the pub was really full good job I only needed the toilet once and one drink, I couldn't wait in a queue that long a second time. I got 3 bits of video of Hume 'n' Beans live at The Greyhound. You can watch them here ( Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 ) I also got some audio as well.

Thursday, 12 July 2012

o2 said that at approximately 1.30pm on Wednesday 11th
July they experienced a fault with one of there network systems which meant
that some mobile phone numbers were unable to register correctly on the
network. O2 engineers were deployed as soon as possible and worked throughout
the night. They will continue to do until full service is
restored. The fault is was not location-specific, nor did it
relate to a mobile number range. This means that customers have been impacted
at random. The 2G network service was restored at 8:00am on Thursday 12th
July, this meant that customers could make calls and send texts on 2G. The 3G
service started to restore around lunchtime on Thursday 12th July.

Tuesday, 3 July 2012

BT
has launched more super fast speeds. The service, which BT intends to make
commercially available from Spring 2013, will enable customers to order an
ultra-fast 330Mbps broadband connection directly to their home or business in
an area served by Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC 2 ) technology. Previously, in
order to receive 330Mbps speeds, customers had to be located in an FTTP (Fibre
to the Premises) enabled area. The pilot will be held in two phases so that
BT Openreach has sufficient time to explore and resolve the challenges in
deploying the service with its customers.

Phase
one, which is intended to test the planning and construction process, will run
from July 2012 to early 2013 in parts of High Wycombe, Bristol South as well as
in St Agnes, Cornwall where the service was first trialled. Edinburgh’s
Waverley exchange will be added to the pilot in September 2012.

Phase
two, which will run from March to May 2013, will test new automated order
processes, and focus on the 330Mbps downstream, 30Mbps upstream product. In
addition to the first four areas, this phase will see the pilot extended to
parts of Watford, Cardiff, Basingstoke, and Manchester Central.

Monday, 2 July 2012

An update on the BT superfast broadband for the Stoke on Trent area. I have heard from BT that by the end of 2013 the Burslem
telephone exchange and the Hanley exchange will be upgraded to BT’s superfast
fibre broadband service. Currently in the local Stoke on Trent area only
the Cheadle exchange, Biddulph exchange and Alsager exchange are currently
enabled and accepting orders for the superfast fibre broadband service from BT.

Friday, 15 June 2012

So as a test I decided to install Windows Server 2012.
I installed this onto Oracle Virtual box. I started the install and hit
an error, “Windows failed to start” with error code “0xc0000225” .

To fix this error, you need to shutdown the virtual
machine. Then right click the machine and select “Settings” the
select “System” and tick “Enable IO APIC” You should do this on any host that
you need to run in 64 bit mode, it is also required if you want to run more
than one CPU on your virtual machine.

When you install Windows Server 2012, you can choose between Server
Core Installation and Server with a GUI as per the
two screenshots below. The “Server with a GUI” option is the Windows 8
equivalent of the Full installation option available in Windows Server 2008 R2.
The “Server Core Installation” option reduces the space required on disk, the
potential attack surface, and especially the servicing requirements, Microsoft
recommend that you choose the Server Core installation unless you have a
particular need for the additional user interface elements and graphical
management tools that are included in the “Server with a GUI” option. For this
reason, the Server Core installation is now the default. Because you can freely
switch between these options at any time later, one approach might be to
initially install the Server with a GUI option, use the graphical tools to
configure the server, and then later switch to the Server Core Installation
option. I went for the “Server with a GUI” option for my test machine.

Saturday, 9 June 2012

The Sentinal cartoon that has been running for more than 20 years is due to be turned into a radio series with the help of 6 Towns Radio. The idea came from 6 Towns Radio DJ Terry Bossons who said "After reading these cartoons all my life, I thought it would be great to breathe new life into them and came up with the radio play idea."

The episodes, which last for roughly one minute, will appear on Terry's Friday afternoon show, Bossons About, from 4pm. They will also be uploaded to the 6 Towns Radio website so people can listen again at any time.

The instalments will be aided by some well-known voices, including Nick Hancock, Pete Conway, Denis Smith and Wendy Turner Webster, who will take on the various roles, including publicans and barbers who pop up in the cartoons.

The voices for the famous bickering husband and wife will be real-life husband and wife team Nick and Maxine King, Nick who presents a Northern Soul show on 6 Towns Radio, said: "It feels good to be a part of it and I suppose I do have quite a strong Potteries accent"

The cartoon's creator, Stafford-born Dave Follows, passed away in 2003 after losing his battle with cancer. Son Chris, aged 41, who lives in London, said: "We're all really pleased to hear the May un Mar Lady characters come to life with real Stoke-on-Trent voices"

Thursday, 7 June 2012

This example shows my TP-LINK TL-WA701ND conning to a Sky Broadband box, but this example will work with other models of TP-LINK and other broadband providers.

The end result of this is that, I have full Wi-Fi coverage in the house, I can be on the internet on my mobile phone in one room and walk into the rear of the house it will then auto connect to the other box and I dont even notice, plus we can now use Wi Fi in the garden which is great if you want to sit outside in the summer, if we get any more sun that is.

So, it was time to upgrade the network at home a bit, due to a few wireless issues. Same as most people, my wireless does not cover the entire house, even though the box is in a centre part of the house and has had a new high gain aerial which did improve things, but its still not perfect.

I was lucky enough to have a RJ45 cable feed to the back room that goes from the Sky router to the PC. So I connected this to a Hub i had and then connected the PC to this alongside the feed to the new TP-LINK box. I put the TP-LINK as high up as possible so it had the best range.

Connecting it up is easy to start with you need to assign a static IP address of 192.168.1.100 to your PC, you dont need a gateway or DNS. Click on the mask and it will auto insert 255.255.255.0 then connect cable from your PC to the box and power it up. Enter 192.168.1.254 in your browser and you can then login with the default username and password (admin/admin) but remember to change the password later.

If your Sky box is not on the 192.168.1.x range then you will need to give this TO-LINK box a new IP address in your range. My network is the 192.168.0.x range so i gave my TP-LINK a IP of 192.168.0.2 and the gateway points back to 192.168.0.1 which is the Ip address of my Sky router.

Regarding the wireless settings, I had fun getting this bit to work how I wanted but in the end I set the box as "Access Point"

One final thing to note, is UPGRADE THE FIRMWARE this bit saved my life, I could get it to connect but it would not auto switch if I moved to the other side of the house, I found a random internet post that suggested upgrade the firmware and this sorted the issue for me. Also you need the Channel to be the same on both box's as well, this is on the Wi-Fi settings.

Saturday, 2 June 2012

So you might get this blue screen error if you have a Dell PC and your trying to install/reinstall Windows XP.

STOP 0x0000007B 0xF7A9263C 0xC0000034

The fix is as follows :-

1. Enter the BIOS by pressing F2 on boot up.2. Select "Drives"3. Select "SATA Operation"4. It will be set as "Raid Auto/AHCI" change this to "Raid Auto/ATA"5. Reboot and this will now let you install Windows XP

Friday, 18 May 2012

Microsoft has recently launched SQL Server 2012. It has some
massive improvements on its predecessor. Reporting Services adds a Web
front-end for data exploration and visualisation, called Power View. SQL
Analysis Services has released a new semantic model, which gives Business
Intelligence professionals more ease and flexibility to build solutions.
Columnstore indexing helps you run queries in a data warehouse faster. Data
Quality Services, along with improvements to Master Data Services, provide the
tools for protecting company data.

Also new in SQL Server 2012 is features which appeal to Database
Business Administrators. Microsoft has improved High Availability: the addition
of AlwaysOn technology allows you to configure read-only copies of your primary
database, and use them for reporting. AlwaysOn has also solved the issue of
failover of multiple dependent databases.

It also has added a feature called ContainedDB which helps you identify
a database to be self-contained so it's not allowed to have external
dependencies. There have been two major indexing improvements: online
re-indexing and column store indexes.

SQL 2012 can now be installed on Windows Server Core, which helps
increase both the security and the speed of the server.

Tuesday, 15 May 2012

So this week I needed a VBS script that would ping. The reason I needed this was to wake a wireless connection up before the script did the rest of its work. A few pings will do this. This script will ping 8.8.8.8 (which is Google) and it will ping 8 times, which was more than enough for what I needed.